What is the most famous wuxia story?

Reading list1357 words

The answer, and the two runners-up

The Legend of the Condor Heroes wins. Not because it is the best written of Jin Yong's books, nor the shortest, but because it reached the most people. No other wuxia novel has.

The particulars are unglamorous and they decide the question. It was serialised from 1957 to 1959 in 40 instalments, at the same time its author was running a newspaper and writing editorials he expected to be arrested for. The novel that made him famous was written by a man with a day job in a colony that could jail him, and the book's obsession with who owes loyalty to whom reads differently once you know that.

Two other answers belong on the same page, and each is correct about a different question. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the most famous wuxia story to anyone who does not read Chinese. The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (笑傲江湖) is what a Chinese fan names for the best rather than the most famous.

The way to separate them is to measure fame three ways: remakes, copies sold, and people who quote the book without having read it. The Condor Heroes takes all three, which is why it wins.

The evidence, as far as it can be counted

Adaptations. The Condor Heroes novels have been filmed for television and cinema since the 1970s, in Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan. Nobody keeps a register of remakes, so the totals are estimates, and each one puts the trilogy on top. Across all 15 of his books, screen adaptations run past 100 titles, and Condor Heroes alone accounts for a large share of them.

Sales. Jin Yong's novels have sold tens of millions of copies in Chinese, and the figure is soft, since authorised and pirate editions cannot be separated. In the 1980s, when the books first reached the mainland in legal print, a single edition could run to millions.

Penetration. The strongest evidence and the least countable. Duels in the book are decided by Sword Intent, the pressure a fighter puts into a blade, and lines from it are proverbs now.

Fame that survives quotation is not the same as fame that survives adaptation, and this count settles the argument.

Why the answer is not the other Jin Yong books

Jin Yong wrote 15 novels between 1955 and 1972, then stopped at 48 and spent the rest of his life revising them. Three get argued about more often than they get read.

The Return of the Condor Heroes is the sequel and, by most rankings, the better book. It is structurally harder: a love story with a taboo at its centre. It is not the most famous, because it sells as the second half of Condor Heroes.

Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils has the most ambitious structure in the canon, three protagonists and a plot that settles an empire's worth of grudges, and its television versions are beloved. It runs 50 chapters across 1963 to 1966, longer than Condor Heroes' 40, which is the only reason it is not the answer.

The Deer and the Cauldron is the last book and the strangest, from 1969 to 1972, 50 chapters, a comic novel about a con man that some readers call his best and others call a betrayal of the genre. It is famous for different reasons and with different people.

That reader also knows which character 侠之大者, the great hero serves his country, belongs to: Guo Jing.

That reader is rare, which is the point: the three answers measure three audiences of very different sizes.

The different kind of fame outside China

For a reader whose first language is English, the answer is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it is not close.

Ang Lee's 2000 film is the one wuxia title that needs no explanation. It won 4 Academy Awards out of ten nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film, and set the vocabulary of every later action film that borrowed the rooftops. It did what no translation has managed: it made the genre legible to people who had never heard of it.

Its fights are the reason. Every duel trades skill between two people, and the energy spent is True Qi, a body's own supply, never flight. A better fighter wins; a worse one is disarmed. The camera never cheats, which is why the film reads as the real thing to a fan.

The source is a novel from 1941 by Wang Dulu, part of a 5-book sequence that almost nobody outside China has read. The film is genuine wuxia, and its debt to the genre's grammar is serious. That it answers the same words differently is not a scandal.

The fan's answer, which is not the same question

Ask a Chinese wuxia fan which book is the best and the most likely answer is The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.

It is about politics. It was written in 1967, 40 chapters, at the peak of a decade the author spent watching his own newspaper take sides in a mainland campaign nobody could survive openly. Its hero is expelled from the school that raised him, then watches it call itself righteous and behave worse than the people it condemns. Its whole project is to make him refuse the genre's rules about who may kill whom, and to make the refusal cost him every rank the martial world offers.

Writers quote it to prove the genre is for adults. Its schools are a sect structure of alliances and betrayals, and the book's subject is who signs which charter.

Linghu Chong, its hero, is the canon's most complete example of the wandering blade, a man who will not agree to a document he does not believe.

What the three answers actually tell you

Three readings follow, one per answer.

If you want a first book, take Condor Heroes. It is the entry point the canon assumes, the translation is competent, and the opening hundred pages introduce every trope the genre owns.

If you want something to watch tonight, take Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. two hours and the genre at its most legible.

If you have read Condor Heroes and want to know what the genre does when it grows up, take The Smiling, Proud Wanderer. After the first, not before.

The three answers, in plain sentences

No, and the confusion is worth clearing up because the two are usually sold as a pair. The Legend of the Condor Heroes is the first book, and it follows Guo Jing and Huang Rong. The Return of the Condor Heroes is the sequel that follows Yang Guo and Xiaolongnu. Read them in that order; the second spoils the first.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and by a wide margin. Ang Lee's film is the one wuxia title that English-speaking audiences can name without prompting, and it made the genre's visual grammar available to a Western audience. Its source novel is a mid-century serial that almost nobody outside China has read.

Because he wrote the characters people quote. 15 novels in, the reading order is still a ritual, and the reasons are measurable: adaptations past 100, sales in the tens of millions, and a canon that Chinese schools discuss as literature rather than as genre. Very few authors in any language reach that position.

Sources & References

• Jin Yong, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, trans. Anna Holmwood (MacLehose, 2018) — the first English translation of the novel, with the translator's note on why the trilogy had gone untranslated for so long.
• Jin Yong, A Bond Undone and A Snake Lies Waiting — the remaining Condor Heroes volumes in the same translation, with the 侠之大者 line in its original context.
• Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) — the Academy Award citation and the film's own debt to the wire-work tradition it was made inside, not outside.
• Wang Dulu, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1941) — the source serial, part of the Crane-Iron sequence, and the reason the film's plot is a compression rather than an invention.
• Wuxiaworld, General Glossary of Terms — the definition of wuxia used to decide which of these answers are answers to the same question. https://www.wuxiaworld.com/page/general-glossary-of-terms